*Polish farmers continue their protests and vigils, now centered on the “Green City”, a small Occupation-style camp they have set up across the street from the prime minister’s palace. Here, groups of farmers camp in shifts, their presence an ongoing Bonus Army-style protest against the agricultural globalization which is systematically liquidating farmers everywhere, from the US and Europe to Africa and India.

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*Farmers are similarly protesting in India. Thousands convened a Kisan Maha Panchayat (farmer meeting) sit-in where they demanded pro-farmer reforms and the rolling back of pernicious globalization pacts. Meanwhile conflicts over GMOs continue within the Modi government’s political coalition in India. The nationalist Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM) has again objected to the new wave of field trials in Maharashtra state, and the central government’s political support for these. The Modi government is ideologically neoliberal and wants to drag India into further servitude to the US government and its corporations, while its coalition allies the SJM and RSS seem to be more like our paleoconservatives here in the US. Although some of them (the Indians, not the US version so far as I’ve seen) have pointed out the evidence against GMO safety, their main concern is globalization’s anti-nationalist economic and political effects.

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*Food sovereignty campaigners protested at the corporate conference convened in London by USAID and the Gates Foundation. They condemned the Western plan to recolonize Africa along corporate industrial agriculture lines. The corporate assault seeks to destroy the existing system of millions of community farmers producing food for their families and communities and replace it with industrial plantations growing industrial GMOs for Asian factory farms and Western ethanol. This is meant to force into being a vast new market for Western proprietary seeds as well as synthetic fertilizers and pesticides produced by Western corporations. It’s also meant to force the African people as a whole to stop producing their own food and instead buy imported food controlled by, yes, Western corporations. These millions of people currently living in farming-based communities are to be driven off their land and into shantytowns. In the end they’re supposed to become ill and eventually die off from disease and starvation. That’s the Monsanto/Gates/US administration plan. More about the London conference here.

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*First reports are that for the second time in two tries, the Bangladesh experiment with Bt brinjal (eggplant) is an agronomic failure and economic disaster for many of the participating farmers. The initial reports are that many plants died prematurely, others that had seemed to be growing well suddenly died of disease or of unknown causes, while plants which produced fruit often yielded poorly. Just as in 2014, there are some reports of plants which failed to resist the target pest, the fruit-and-shoot borer. The director of the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) shrugged off most of the disaster, quipping “we never said the plants wouldn’t be vulnerable to disease”. BARI has been running the breeding program and the limited commercial experiments. The initial technical development was done by Monsanto-Mahyco, and most funding came from the US public via USAID. So this worthless project, which gravely threatens the genetic basis of the world’s center for brinjal biodiversity, and which can benefit no one but Monsanto, is being paid for by American taxpayers.

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*Some good news for Australian organic farmer Steve Marsh in his legal battles with a neighboring contract farmer, Michael Baxter, whose GMO canola contaminated Marsh’s farm and cost him his organic certification. Marsh is currently appealing the pro-Monsanto trial decision, where the judge essentially ruled that GMO contamination is inevitable and normative, and that if organic farming can’t move its face from where Monsanto wants to swing its fist, then it deserves to be hit. The decision included an order that Marsh pay the polluter’s legal bills. But the appeals court has ruled that Baxter must disclose to the court how much legal assistance he got from trade groups and from any corporation such as Monsanto itself. This is significant since Australian law says that awards of legal expenses can cover only what a litigant spent out of his own pocket. Australian industry groups adopted Baxter as a poster child from the beginning of the original lawsuit, but never publicly disclosed how much money they or Monsanto were paying for his legal defense.

*Monsanto has announced another farcical settlement of claims by seven groups of Midwestern and Southern US wheat farmers arising from the 2013 Oregon incident where a farmer discovered feral Roundup Ready wheat in his field, sparking a collapse in wheat exports as Asian markets rejected potentially contaminated shipments. According to the company, the settlement is in the form of $350,000 in donations to various agricultural schools. In other words, Monsanto gets to have its standard financial controls over university agriculture departments double as lawsuit settlements. Pretty sweet. This is even better than last November’s settlement with Oregon wheat farmers. There, although most of the money went to pro-GM wheat trade groups, a modest amount went to the farmers themselves. Here it sounds like no farmer is getting a penny. All the money basically goes back to Monsanto itself, in the form of value from lobbying and corruption. This kind of thing is becoming more common with corporate “settlements”.

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*More buffoonery from Patrick Moore. This time he was claiming in a taped interview that glyphosate was safe enough to drink and that “I’d be happy to” drink some if it were offered. When the interviewer, a documentary filmmaker exposing the health and socioeconomic ravages of the industrial soy system in Argentina, produced a glass, Moore flip-flopped, refused to drink it, and stomped out. We must stress that in spite of his generally stupid and undignified demeanor, Moore is one of the most prominent professional climate change deniers and is celebrated by the most respectable figures of the pro-GMO establishment. In particular, “World Food Prize” winner Marc von Montagu and “golden rice” lead developer Ingo Potrykus recently led an effort to endorse Moore’s “contributions to science” on behalf of the GMO establishment, thus rendering official the ideological unity of pro-GMO activism and climate change denial. No GMO supporter objected to the Moore anointment.

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*In 2013 the Maine legislature passed a GMO labeling law which, like Connecticut’s, requires that several other states pass similar laws before it becomes effective. This is called a “trigger”. This immediately proved a problem since Maine’s trigger specified that adjoining New Hampshire would have to be one of the states enacting a similar policy, but a legislative attempt there soon afterward failed. Now a new proposed bill in Maine would upgrade the 2013 law by removing the trigger. If this bill passes Maine would join Vermont as the second state to pass a true labeling law without the self-negating trigger. Obviously a law with a trigger is, at best, a study in ambivalence. Most likely it indicates a government which wants to pretend to be doing something without actually having to do it.

The notion that glyphosate is “safer” than other herbicides is a mainstay even among lukewarm critics of GMOs, and of course the US government has long propagated this slogan, although in order for it to do so the EPA had to change its 1985 finding of “possibly carcincogenic to humans” to “evidence of non-carcinogenicity in humans” in 1991. As with all EPA findings since the beginning of the GMO era, this change had zero to do with scientific evidence, but was a purely political decision to accommodate Monsanto. Now lying like this will be a bit more difficult, as the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer has upgraded its assessment: Glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans”.

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Actually they’ve known glyphosate is carcinogenic since the 1980s, and as I said even the Reagan EPA felt constrained to call it a “possible human carcinogen”. The EPA then downgraded that to “not a carcinogen”, straight up because Monsanto demanded it. Today we see Monsanto’s hysterical reaction to the previously reliable WHO breaking ranks like this. We’ll see if the WHO sticks by its guns or moves to marginalize its own scientific finding. Of course Monsanto’s already succeeding in getting the corporate media to “report” on “the controversy” rather than on the fact. But at least the fact that the WHO is now admitting this brings Roundup’s cancer-causing nature into the media’s realm of controversy, whereas the cartel, the US government, and the NYT have long collaborated in making glyphosate’s toxicity an un-fact. (Maybe the American Cancer Society will now have to acknowledge the very existence of this cancer agent.) Even many GMO critics have parroted the Monsanto line that glyphosate is “less toxic” than other herbicides. Hopefully this will at least put an end to that self-defeating stupidity.

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Let’s get this point straight: Glyphosate as well as 2,4-D and dicamba are highly toxic. The Big Lie is that glyphosate is not highly toxic, period. That’s what the liars always mean when they call it “less toxic”. So it’s idiotic to even ask “which is worse.” The point is that they’re both well beyond the level of “too toxic to be used at all.”

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As always we must stress that glyphosate is never used in pure form, but is always deployed in commercial forms like Roundup which contain several other toxic ingredients. These real world commercial formulations are far more toxic than ivory tower glyphosate. That’s why it’s a standard scam among regulators to assess only the non-commercial “pure” glyphosate, because they know it’s less toxic. Yet, as the IARC has finally acknowledged, even pure glyphosate is severely toxic and causes cancer.

More fun with glyphosate and Roundup: A new study gives further proof that Roundup, as well as glyphosate even in its pure form is acutely toxic to human cells and is an endocrine disruptor through causing the death of cells which produce progesterone. The study tested in vitro exposure to human cells at concentration levels allowed in Australian drinking water. It found that Roundup is more deadly to human cells than pure glyphosate (thus again proving that the real world formulation is more toxic than the “pure” chemical which is the sole purview of regulators), but that both kill cells and cause endocrine disruption through cell death. The study didn’t probe whether these poisons are endocrine disruptors in other ways, but there’s strong evidence for this as well.

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Among the less heralded US government handouts to Monsanto is the longstanding Roundup fumigation program in Colombia, whose proximate goal is to wipe out coca cultivation. This gives a good insight into the real character of the Drug War and any pretensions it has to being about “public health”. On the contrary, it has nothing to do with human health and everything to do with power and corporate welfare. In a case like this the farcical character of the “health” aspect is especially on display, as the spraying program, a veritable chemical warfare campaign (compare the Agent Orange chemical weapons campaign during the Vietnam War), is well documented as causing severe health effects. The Colombian government has supported US paramilitary campaigns within its country because the US pays it off and because they have a shared enemy in legitimate popular movements among the peasantry. But with this WHO report, even some within the Colombian government are starting to wonder if this wholesale program of poisoning the people’s bodies and destroying their crops isn’t, just maybe, politically and ultimately militarily doing more harm than good.

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The fact is there’s no such thing as a demarcation between purely “civilian” poison spraying and chemical warfare. It’s all on a militaristic spectrum, thus the popularity of violent names for agricultural poisons. Monsanto seems to prefer the Wild West theme. Similarly, the agrochemical corporations and the US government effectively see themselves as waging war upon humanity in general and in particular upon small farmers, subsistence farmers, organic farmers, farmers producing food for communities, all farmers and communities not sufficiently coordinated according to the corporate imperative. The goal is to clear the land for mechanized industrial plantations under corporate control. The goal is to force the people off the land and into slums. The campaign is the same as the post-medieval, pre-modern enclosure campaigns of Europe. The only difference is that in the earlier campaign part of the goal was to forcibly generate an urban proletariat, while today the shantytowns are meant to serve as terminal concentration camps for the permanently liquidated and immiserated. I defy anyone to tell me poison-based agriculture isn’t chemical warfare, against people on a more profound level than against bugs and weeds. Roundup has long been the number one weapon of globalization war. It generated the most perfect agro-state yet, Argentina’s “Soy Republic”.

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That Roundup and glyphosate, along with 2,4-D and dicamba, are also severely toxic and destructive to human and ecosystem health renders the chemical warfare concept physically as well as economically true. There are many things preventing us from living in peace and prosperity. Among the most vicious assaults upon us are agricultural poisons like Roundup and GMOs. We must abolish them completely if humanity is to have a future, physically or in any other meaningful sense.

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Today even the usually pro-GMO World Health Organization itself is saying: Roundup is cancer. This is a physical fact, and it’s a political and spiritual fact. We must do what’s necessary.

I’ve often written about how the FDA has no review process for GMOs. All the FDA has is a voluntary letter dance: If it chooses, the developer sends the FDA a letter saying it performed this or that bogus test on its own product and is satisfied that the product is safe. The FDA then replies, to paraphrase, “We understand that you consider this product to be safe.” And that’s it. That’s the whole alleged review. That’s the quicksand upon which all the liars, including in government and media, build their lie that GMOs are ever tested or reviewed for safety at all.

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The historical and ideological fact is that in the 1980s, under cartel tutelage, the FDA adopted the “substantial equivalence” of GMOs and true crops as its doctrine. This was in spite of the fact that there was never any evidence for substantial equivalence, that GMOs which express Bt toxins and/or are suffused with herbicide residues are self-evidently VERY different from their non-GM counterparts*, and that a large amount of evidence has subsequently accumulated that GMOs are substantially different from non-GM crops in many other compositional ways (here’s just one example). Reason rejected “substantial equivalence” from the start, and since then science has completely trounced it. But none of that matters to the FDA, for whom substantial equivalence is nothing more or less than fundamentalist religious dogma.

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To see the latest example of your government regulators in action, check out the FDA’s press release concluding its “review” of the botox apple and the “Innate” potato. At the bottom of the release are links to the two FDA letters to the respective developers, where it says “we understand…” Note that neither letter contains a shred of information, but is pure bureaucrat-speak which adds up to trust in the fox guarding the henhouse.

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No sane person thinks the profit-seeking developers of GMOs or other agricultural poisons can be trusted to judge the safety of their own products. Reason and common sense would reject such an absurd notion out of hand, and then we have the evidence record of the entire industrial era which proves that profit-seekers will ALWAYS lie about their own products.

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There’s no doubt and no debate: The corporate state is dedicated to the aggrandizement of the corporate rackets. In this case, the government system is set up intentionally to help the poison corporations lie about the health harms of their products. The FDA, EPA, and USDA are conscious, willful, systematic liars on behalf of the wholesale poisoning of people, livestock, and the environment. (This is in addition to the government’s role as corporate welfare purveyor and creator of supply-driven markets for these products, which usually have no natural market.) As always, I challenge anyone to try to refute this, or to defend the system on any level. It would be very amusing to hear someone explain how the fox can be trusted with the henhouse, and therefore the FDA’s process makes any sense at all.

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And so again, for the thousandth time, we have refutation of the lie that GMOs are tested for safety. Never have been, never will be, by this government or any other. And so we also have, again for the thousandth time, refutation of the delusion that we the people can look to government regulators for defense of our well-being. On the contrary, nothing could be more clear than that these regulators systematically lie to we the people on behalf of those who are poisoning us. At the New Nuremburg we’ll be putting the FDA and EPA cadres in the dock right alongside their partners from Monsanto and Dow.

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*I propose this demonstration, in thought or with physical props, to make clear what the FDA and the bodies which have adopted its doctrine are claiming when they say “substantial equivalence”. I’m holding two ears of corn. I say “All the kernels on this ear are loaded with Bt toxins. This other ear is free of Bt. But they’re physically the same thing.” Does that make sense? Similarly, I hold two handfuls of soybeans. I say “These soybeans are full of Roundup. These other soybeans have no Roundup residues. But they’re physically the same thing.” Agree? And to say again, GMOs are often found to be compositionally different in other significant, completely unpredictable, ways.

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The bad faith and intellectual idiocy of the whole endeavor are on display with the fact that “substantial equivalence” has always really meant, “equivalent except for the major poison inherent in the GMO.” But, needless to say, that’s not how the FDA or its corporate media flunkeys portray the concept when propagating it for the public’s edification.

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Substantial Equivalence, upon which the US government’s entire pro-GMO propaganda edifice is built, is a classic Big Lie.

*Good article on the current status of the land-grabbing onslaught, with special focus on Mozambique. As we knew all along, land-grabbing, like globalized corporate agriculture in general, has zero to do with food production and is about nothing but profit for the finance sector, Big Ag, and the corrupt governments of the target countries.

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*The most direct cause of the impending extinction of the monarch butterfly is the destruction of its larval food source, milkweed, by herbicides, in particular Roundup. A letter from 52 House members to Obama correctly points out that nothing short of “a sea-change in how the federal government address the use of herbicides, especially as applied to herbicide-resistant crops, vital monarch habitats will simply continue to disappear”. The letter implicitly wants to use monarch’s listing under the Endangered Species Act as the weapon to force a phase-out of herbicide-tolerant GMOs.

If people want to try to use the ESA to fight for the monarch, that’s great as long as they’re conscious of the fact that no kind of ad hoc “habitat preservation” can work here. The problem is a systemic industrial practice. Thus the goal is not to preserve territory but to eradicate a practice. Meanwhile, the letter correctly points out that individuals planting milkweed, while a fine thing to do (I’ve done it too), is no systemic solution. To view that as sufficient would be an example of the same kind of delusion as that changing one’s light bulbs, in itself, is a meaningful action vs. climate change.

*The Pakistani small and landless farmer union Kissan Mazdoor Tehreek is vowing to fight back against the country’s new draconian seed law. This law was unconstitutionally passed by the National Assembly even though in Pakistan agriculture is a state matter. (There’s a similar coup being attempted in India, where the proposed Biotechnology Regulatory Authority bill would usurp constitutionally declared state agricultural power and override it with central government preemption.) The law will enshrine the patent and taxation rights of Monsanto and other global corporations and would force a licensing system upon all seed marketing. The farmers have fiercely resisted equivalent bills at the state level. This policy and a similar pending Plant Breeder Rights bill (which will intensify the intellectual property licence being enshrined by the seed law) will further impose upon farmers the industrial model which is already a proven failure in Pakistan, just as it is in India. The goal in both countries is the same, to liquidate small farmers, drive them off the land and into shantytowns, and concentrate the farmland into large industrial plantations controlled by the corporations.

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As always with seed privatization laws, this one has no provision for quality control or farmer recourse in the case of failed or fraudulent seeds.

The idea that system schooling is to indoctrinate children into obedience to “authority” and prepare them to become corporate cogs (or, for the growing percentage who have no economic future, to acquiesce in the system and in their own economic liquidation) isn’t speculation. In the 19th century the original advocates of free, universal schooling weren’t progressive pedagogues, but banks, railroads, and factory owners. Faced with the need to rapidly escalate the industrial work force but having to deal with an influx to the cities of uneducated, independent-minded people raised on farms, they wanted the government to take on the responsibility of giving putative workers a basic education and docility training which would prepare them for factory work. This basic purpose of system schooling never changed.

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Today standardized testing and the Common Core are meant to intensify and “streamline” (to use one of the austerians’ favorite terms) this indoctrination/pacification agenda. This piece compares testing to the “duck and cover” drills of the 1950s. It’s a good comparison, although he forgets to mention that such an exercise wasn’t just a part of Cold War indoctrination, but that in the most direct psychological sense such exercises in abrupt terror and disorientation are an essential part of any kind of cult indoctrination. The literal ordeal of standardized testing, and the stress leading up to it, is a similar exercise.

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Of course standardized testing is also designed to fail large numbers of children in order to demonize their schools and provide a formal pretext for stripping these schools of funding, thus setting them up for privatization.

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In all this we see how the system views the vast majority of people as utterly worthless and expendable from even an exploitation point of view. Corporations need only a relatively small number of cadres, so the schools in general can be viewed as nothing but fodder for privatization and profit. If they cease to educate, or if they cease to exist at all, and however many millions of children are sacrificed out of hand, is no ultimate concern of the corporate system. In the same way the system wants to send the vast majority of the people of the global South on one-way trips to the shantytowns, so it’s feeling its way toward doing the same in the West itself.

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It was those same 19th century banks and railroads who originally lobbied for government establishment of the land grant college system, germplasm procurement programs, public crop breeding, and free seed distribution to farmers. Back then there was no Big Ag sector to lobby for its own corporate welfare, but other industrial and finance sectors wanted the government to undertake the project of rendering agriculture far more productive while requiring far fewer workers, since those workers would be needed in the factories and it would be necessary to provide cheap calories to feed them. That was the economic origin of industrial agriculture, which only in the 20th century became a sector in its own right, seeking its own aggrandizement.

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Today agriculture itself wants to shed the great majority of its Southern workers, while the corporate sweatshops are already at saturation. There’s nowhere on Earth where a primary corporate goal isn’t to drive the people somewhere, anywhere, just OUT. Let me stress that this has nothing to do with any alleged absolute “overpopulation”. On the contrary, there’s no chance of humanity reaching any absolute overpopulation level relative to the Earth’s resources. Overpopulation can exist only relative to per capita ecological and resource consumption and destruction, as is the case with Western lifestyles, or relative to politically chosen policy, as is the case with supply-driven corporate globalization. 100% of the social pathology, economic waste, and human misery involved in people being driven off their land is purely artificial and voluntarily chosen by Western governments and corporations (and compliant Southern governments) and forced upon the people.

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This is the same framework as the fact that the world already produces far more than enough food for all the people who exist now or ever will exist, and yet hunger, malnutrition, and other diet-related diseases continue to increase. This is 100% because of the artificially, politically chosen and imposed corporate food distribution system. It’s impossible to meaningfully discuss hunger except by asking the question: How do we overthrow corporate control of agriculture and food?

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Of course education could help with this question, which is why the schools must be completely corporate-regimented or else dismantled completely. As I started out saying, this is in line with the historical purpose of system schooling.

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What humanity really needs are its own democratic participation schools.

*A few weeks back I mentioned US Right to Know’s Freedom of Information requests to several prominent pro-GMO activists ensconced in academia, in the course of citing these as typical examples of how the pro-GM activists consistently impersonate various kinds of scientists and other professionals even as they hypocritically insist that GM critics have no standing to opine unless they possess the right “credentials”. As I documented there, without exception all pro-GM activists stray far beyond the bounds of their own formal credentials, where they have any in the first place. (Many do not.)

Toward these goals Cornell, using Gates money, created a bogus position for corporate publicist Mark Lynas and other Monsanto and Gates-affiliated publicists. Similarly, the Guardian published an op-ed from three paid mercenaries while abetting them in suppressing their conflict of interest. The Guardian let them fraudulently depict themselves as being “neutral academics” while failing to list their paid positions with the GMO cartel. Most hilariously of all, they regurgitated the self-evident lie comparing GMO critics to climate change deniers even as at least one of the three, Philip Sharp, is himself a climate change denier employed by the Koch Brothers.

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As I developed in an earlier post, the real demarcation is being a corporate mercenary vs. being a critic of corporate-decreed “science”. It’s GMO advocacy and climate change denial which logically line up, and sure enough the ranks of pro-GMO activists include many professional climate change deniers: Patrick Moore, Owen Paterson, Matt Ridley, Bjorn Lomborg, just to name a few. By contrast, there are no climate change deniers among GMO critics. There you see the measure of the mainstream media’s integrity, that it keeps repeating the lie but never takes even five minutes to investigate whether real-life climate change deniers actually support or oppose GMOs.

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The fact that the likes of National Geographic, the Guardian, and many others intentionally refrain from this simple fact check is proof that they’re most interested in propagating this lie and want to suppress knowledge of the truth, which they know would be unfavorable to their agenda.

The concept of chemical no-till as carbon sequestration tactic was bogus in principle, since the slathering of Roundup destroys the soil ecosystem which incorporates carbon as humus in the first place. The very term “sequestration” demonstrates the fundamental error of the approach: Nature doesn’t “sequester” anything, but actively incorporates it into a dynamic system. Poison-based agriculture, of which the Roundup Ready system is the ultimate example, automatically destroys the soil ecosystem and leaves sterile dirt which would be incapable of incorporating carbon. That’s why irrigation water has to be fortified with chemical additives to bind it to dirt molecules. That’s the only way to keep the water from running off the site immediately, eroding all the dirt with it. Sure enough, studies found that chemical no-till could at best “sequester” a small amount of carbon in the immediate topsoil where the biomass from the previous crop degrades, but does nothing to build organic matter deeper into the dirt, turning it into real soil. The whole concept of chemical no-till is incorrect. That’s to be expected, as it’s an extension of the absolutely erroneous NPK ideology, which is the source of all the agronomic and ecological pathologies in the first place.

In the real world, industrial agriculture is the worst driver of climate change. It is the most profligate emitter of greenhouse gases and by far the worst destroyer of carbon sinks. GMOs comprise the escalation of all the pathologies of industrial agriculture including those affecting climate change.

More broadly – politically, economically, ecologically, and in the most stark terms of our being able to eat in the future – humanity’s great imperative is to abolish industrial agriculture and transform to agroecology on a food sovereignty basis. Nothing short of this will suffice physically, nor is anything short of this worthy of our great human endeavor.

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What are the mean little lies of hacks and scribblers compared to that?

*The next conclave of the corporate groups plotting to recolonize Africa along GMO lines is being held in London on March 23rd. As ther African Center for Biosafety puts it, “white men meet in London to plot ways of profiting off Africa’s seed system”. The racial balance of power and intended control here is indeed astoundingly lopsided, and the overall racism of the project is quite brazen. No farmers or other democratic participants will be allowed at the meeting, only corporate and government elites. The meeting will discuss a study commissioned by the Gates Foundation. The goal of the study was to develop a strategy for enclosure and control of the African seed system, including identifying where governments should provide corporate welfare and where they should give Western (white) corporations total power and license. African governments are to be rubberstamp flunkeys, and in general Africans will be allowed to participate only as lowly thugs and contractors. As the ACB puts it, “A potential role for farmers in the production or distribution of seed is not even considered. Indeed farmers are viewed only as passive consumers of seed produced elsewhere.” The same is true of the people of Africa as a whole. I’m reminded of what Rudolf Binding wrote about WWI – “In this war both armies lie on the ground, and only the war has its way.” That shall be the predicament of all peoples of the Earth for as long as we allow the corporate war upon us to have its way.

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*A rare case of a GMO corporate welfare program being discontinued: Malaysia’s health ministry has announced it will discontinue its program of using Oxitec’s GM mosquitoes to try to fight dengue fever on the grounds that trial releases in 2010 and 2011 produced meager results greatly disproportionate to the public expense of the program. Brazil’s program has been shelved for the same reason. The idea is to release genetically modified males of the species Aedes aegypti whose offspring from wild females will die prior to reaching maturity. This is supposed to suppress the overall population. But it hasn’t worked in field trials, and Helen Wallace of UK GeneWatch recently publicized a computer model which finds that you’d have to release 2.8 million of the GM males a week to suppress a population of 20,000 mosquitoes. Even the corporate welfare planned economy of GMOs may blanch at such a prospect, though the US government is desperately trying to bail out Oxitec (a British company) by proposing a completely gratuitous field release in the Florida Keys.

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All this information involves the GMO product failing absolutely. Then there’s the likelihood that even if the program temporarily worked to suppress A. aegypti, the only result would be that another species of dengue-carrying mosquito would enter the vacated ecological niche. That effect has followed like clockwork most places Bt crops have been deployed. So the GM mosquito is dubious in ivory tower theory, refuted by computer modeling, and is proven not to work in practice. Any government which would spend one cent on it is engaging in pure embezzlement on behalf of a favored corporation.

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*Good analysis of another scam GMO product, Simplot’s “Innate” potato. As always with these boutique GMOs, its alleged benefits are frivolous, unsubstantiated, or a scam. In this case the potato allegedly reduces the production of a carcinogenic by-product of cooking, acrylamide; but this same carcinogen is vastly more prevalent in all herbicide tolerant GMOs, because it’s a common herbicide additive, and in all crops subjected to industrial irrigation, because it’s added to the water to help keep the dead soil bound together so it won’t blow away. And as always with literally every such GMO alleged to produce any kind of agronomic or product quality trait, there already exist non-GM varieties which embody the trait better, more safely, and far less expensively than the GMO does. As always, the GMO is absolutely worthless, wasteful, and destructive for humanity and benefits no one but a handful of corporations.

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*Climate change denier and top Monsanto shill Patrick Moore has been touring Southeast Asia lobbying and propagandizing for the “golden rice” hoax. In the Philippines he’s met rejection from the people, and slunk out of the country refusing an invitation from the farmer group Masipag to publicly debate them. Even by the extremely low standards of pro-GM activists Moore is one of the more stupid and scabrous of them, and would likely fare very poorly in a debate. Meanwhile Masipag has been publicly describing the kind of productive, nutritious horticulture which is high in vitamin A, has historically provided this nutrient in abundance, and which has been largely destroyed by the industrial agriculture model Moore and golden rice stand for. It’s the likes of Patrick Moore who artificially created the VAD epidemic and are intentionally trying to make it worse with their misdirectional propaganda campaigns. Moore and the others have all this blood on their hands and must be held accountable.

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*The EPA is so spooked by corn rootworm’s surging resistance to the Bt toxins which have been deployed against it that it’s proposing to limit the farmer practice of planting corn year after year with no crop rotation. (It’s actually bureaucratic rigmarole which wouldn’t change anything. It’s the monoculture, stupid.) The ability to plant corn-on-corn was of course the main selling point with which the cartel and the USDA touted Bt corn in the first place, even though everyone knew it would lead only to the target pests developing resistance, along with a host of other problems. Indeed, Monsanto counted on the pests developing resistance as a key part of its planned obsolescence and “expanded trait penetration” marketing strategy. EPA has always chosen to hide its head in the sand, take the path of least resistance, and tout its “refuge” scam as a legitimate anti-resistance strategy. The rootworms have begged to differ.

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Of the three anti-rootworm toxins deployed so far, researchers have confirmed the avalanche of observed evidence that the rootworms are overcoming Monsanto’s Cry3Bb1 toxin and Syngenta’s Cry3A, and in 2014 there were anecdotal reports of resistance developing to Dow’s Cry34/35AB1. Formal research will soon confirm this.

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*Testbiotech has filed a complaint with the EU Ombudsman over the corrupt, publicly-funded GRACE project. GRACE is intended to set new (lax, pro-cartel) standards for GMO safety review and is also a propaganda campaign nominally under EU auspices, but staffed by biotech cadres. The complaint is specifically about how participants propagated a fraudulent account of a feeding trial, and their covering up their conflicts of interest. (There’s really no conflict, of course. They and the EC are 100% pro-GMO.) Filing a complaint with the ombudsman is fine, but far more important is publicizing the facts about GRACE to the people

*Costco joins McDonald’s in issuing a vague announcement that it will phase out meats produced through antibiotic abuse, which means all factory farm meat. They say they’ll start with rotisserie chicken and move on to other meats. It’s really more of an elleged aspiration than a firm policy commitment, with no detailed time frame given. Subtherapeutic antibiotic use in factory farms, along with the use of antibiotic resistance markers in genetic engineering, is by far the most comprehensive, systematic policy seeking to devastate public health by eradicating the effectiveness of this whole genre of medical treatment, antibiotics. Anyone who sincerely cares about public health must seek the abolition of subtherapeutic antibiotic use as Priority Number One. Anyone who claims to be concerned about public health but who doesn’t focus on this, and there are many such people out there these days, is a liar.

*Anti-democracy whack-a-mole. In 2013 and 2014 respectively voters in Hawaii and Maui counties passed GMO cultivation bans (grandfathering in existing GM papaya cultivation) while in 2013 the Kauai county council passed modest restrictions and notification requirements for spraying of poisons on the island’s experimental plantations. The cartel sued and the same corrupt federal judge overturned all three ordinances on grounds that only the state has the power to enact such legislation. The cases are being appealed to the federal circuit court. Meanwhile the state legislature has bills in process to restore such power to the counties and/or to ban GMOs cultivation. Neither bill is likely to pass anytime soon, but if they did you can bet the same federal courts would change their tune and find that such powers aren’t state powers after all but reside with the central government. The cartel is already arguing that in its suit against Vermont’s labeling law.

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All this federalist rigmarole proves that in the end we the people will never win justice in the courts or at any legislative level above the local, but that we’ll need to fight for and win our rights as a fact on the ground, politically and in whatever other way necessary. Only from a victorious grassroots reclamation of our political and economic sovereignty can we then dictate our human futures. That’s the truly necessary Reclamation movement.

Or as I should say, the evident attempt to rile up hatred against a small, relatively harmless dissident group to set them up as scapegoats for the vastly worse threats being forced upon us by corporate agriculture.

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Let me stress at the outset that this post is not about vaccination in itself. Vaccination makes sense in principle. But I begin by stressing that there are two separate questions here: Vaccine science in principle, and the safety of corporate-manufactured vaccines we actually have. In a typical authoritarian tactic those who criticize non-vaccinators always smear these two together and come up with the standard lie, “anti-vax = anti-science”. Now, maybe there are some non-vaccinators who reject vaccination as such, in principle. But everyone I’ve seen is mostly or completely motivated by skepticism toward the corporations who manufacture and advertise them. Obviously no rational person would take on faith the word of corrupt corporate and government scienticians, given their record to date systematically lying about cigarette smoking, asbestos, PCBs, dioxin, DDT, GMOs, and many other poisons, as well as denying climate change.

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[I’ll also stress, since industry propagandists and the corporate media try to confuse this fact, that the rational and empirically-proven common thread is that corporate “science” always lies, dissidents are usually right. To give a common example, in comparing climate change denial with criticism of genetic engineering, the correct conceptual division is not being “for” or “against” some vapid, abstract notion of “science”, though such gaseous conceptual shibboleths are standard with scientism ideology. The correct line which works in real life is the faith-based swallowing of corporate propaganda which calls itself “science”, vs. taking a critical view of this propaganda.

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Climate change denial is interesting in that some powerful corporate sectors like finance seek to profit off scams like carbon offsets or geoengineering and so “believe in” climate change, while others like Big Oil are fervent “deniers”. Monsanto and the GMO cartel play both sides of the fence. In reality no corporatist or technocrat cares one way or the other about climate change or its effects. They “believe” whatever it’s profitable to believe. So it’s not surprising that while so far as I’ve seen there are no GMO critics who also deny climate change, the ranks of the pro-GMO activists are littered with climate change deniers – Patrick Moore, Marc van Montague, Ingo Potrykus, Owen Paterson, Matt Ridley, Bjorn Lomborg, just to name a few. So much for the lies of “National Geographic” and others who are desperately trying to push the notion that opposing corporate “science” is the same thing as opposing science. The truth is the exact opposite. Indeed, to support GMOs is by definition to be an implicit climate change denier. This is because industrial agriculture, as the #1 emitter of greenhouse gases and the #1 destroyer of carbon sinks, is the worst sector driving climate change, while GMOs comprise nothing more or less than an escalation of industrial ag and an aggravation of all its pathologies.]

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In any discussion or debate I’d keep insisting on keeping the two separate questions, separate. That means, for non-vaccinators as well as for anyone who opposes irrational scientistic lynch mobs, focusing on how dubious corporate-controlled vaccination is. Of course I’m against the corporatism of vaccines, as I am against all corporatism.

In the same way that the refusal of Monsanto or the US government to test GMOs for safety proves that they live in terror of what the results of such tests would be, so the government’s grant of immunity and setting up of a massive corporate welfare fund to force the taxpayers to pay off corporate liabilities for toxic products proves that the government believes the products are going to be ever more dangerous.

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Of course it’s obscene and irrational – if dispensing vaccines is too risky for corporate liability, isn’t it too risky in general? At the very least, if they won’t assume the risk, how can their profit be justified? In that case the government should take over the entire operation on a public non-profit basis. There we have proof of principle, of the overall bad faith of the system (how can it be rationally or morally coherent to absolve “capitalists” of risk and force that risk onto the taxpayers, but still allow those companies to collect profit?) and of the fact that the companies and the government believe the legal risk is extreme. They think it likely these vaccines will have dire side effects.

Unlike GMOs*, vaccines do make sense in principle. But what they could be in principle and what Big Drug corporations actually do in producing them are two completely separate things. The fact that the critics of vaccine dissent are incapable of making this distinction is one of the proofs that they’re motivated not by real concern for public health but by authoritarian cultism.

Now we reach the core question regarding those who pretend to support vaccination but should really be called “anti-anti-vaxxers”, since their actions prove they’re not really for anything, but instead are merely majoritarians attacking a small dissenting group. How is it possible to talk meaningfully about the alleged health risks from a relative handful of vaccine dissenters while the same fear-mongers do nothing to put a stop to the infinitely worse public health threat from antibiotic abuse in factory farms and antibiotic resistance markers in genetic engineering? This is, after all, a massive, systematic corporate campaign to destroy the effectiveness of antibiotics. Any adverse health effects of non-vaccination are utterly trivial compared to these and other massive corporate assaults on public health (pesticides, Fukushima’s fallout, just to name two more).

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Anyone who doesn’t spend significant time and energy calling for the abolition of antibiotic abuse has zero credibility if he claims to be concerned about the relatively infinitesimal risk of non-vaccination. The shrillness of the anti-anti-vaxxers juxtaposed with their resounding silence where it comes to antibiotic abuse adds up to proof that they’re lying when they claim to be worried about public health. Obviously their “concern” is for something other than public health. On the contrary, they’re authoritarian statists who are outraged by a form of civil disobedience they find particularly offensive as an affront to their statism and scientism. They should be systematically counterattacked as such, whatever one’s views on vaccination itself.

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So faced with anyone who claims to criticize non-vaccinators from the point of view of a concern for public health, I start with one question: What have you done to oppose subtherapeutic antibiotic abuse in factory farms and genetic engineering? Please direct me to where you’ve written about or taken action on this.

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A satisfactory answer to this is necessary to establish someone’s bona fides. Anyone who can’t do so is a fraud who’s really jumping in a typical way onto an anti-dissident bandwagon out of typically cowardly bullying authoritarian motives.

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In my analysis and criticism of corporate agriculture I’ve refused to argue substantively with pro-GMO activists and others who are clearly acting in bad faith and lying about their fundamental motivations. Instead I counterattack to demolish their lies and destroy their credibility. Where it comes to the vaccination lynch mob, dissenters and critics should always counterattack these bad faith liars the way I describe. The only way the people can win is if enough people are disciplined that way. The point is to reveal them as authoritarian liars and hypocrites who have zero credibility as they attack trivial or nonexistent “threats” while the vastly greater dangers go unchallenged. (Remember the crooks who wanted to ban a local seed library out of fears over “agri-terrorism”? Of course the supporters of centralized industrial ag are intentionally rendering America’s food supply vulnerable to terrorism, while decentralization is the only solution to this and every other problem.) I’d never allow an anti-anti-vaxxer to get away with ignoring CAFOs and antibiotic resistance markers in GMOs. I’d just hammer and hammer and hammer – “What are you doing for the struggle to abolish antibiotic abuse, an infinitely worse public health danger?” Until I got a satisfactory answer, I’d refuse to even discuss vaccination. In general, we should seize every opportunity to counterattack and direct attention to the lethal pandemics being prepared by corporate agriculture and by globalization in general.

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This takes us to what’s going on the corporate media lately, a top-down media-engineered campaign intended to demonize the trivial group of non-vaccinators. Given the growing evidence of the ongoing harms and great dangers of the corporate agricultural system, as well as how obviously destructive the rest of the corporate onslaught is becoming, the corporate media is increasingly desperate to trump up diversions and scapegoats. In the case of the lethal pandemics already being caused by globalization’s shantytowns and factory farms, and the far worse ones inevitably to come, the system’s goal is to provide scapegoats to divert public fears and anger, as well as to muster fascistic discipline among potential cadres along the lines of scientism, the only purely corporate ideology which can tap into ideological threads which aren’t 100% mercenary. Thus the most unreconstructed, brutal greed, powerlust, sadism, and hate try to make common cause with what’s left of the withering “Progress” ideology.

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Whatever the trivial effects of non-vaccination, if any, the great disease incubators of the planet are the factory farms and shantytowns created by globalization and by corporate agriculture in particular. No one who’s not fighting CAFOs, GMOs that use antibiotic resistance markers, and corporate agriculture in general has any standing to say a word about vaccination. Those who do so regardless are really lying when they claim to care about public health. They’re really motivated by authoritarianism.

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I’d call this a basic litmus test for authoritarianism and the very ability to conceive in non-corporatized terms: Having the right perspective on an ad hoc handful of non-vaccinators, vs. the massive, systematic campaign of the biggest, most powerful corporations and governments on earth to destroy antibiotics as a medically useful technology. I’d expect anyone who’s on the level to forget the non-vaxxers immediately and get after those corporations and government bureaucracies.

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The two necessary goals: Abolish factory farms, abolish GMOs. Nothing short of this can suffice, and nothing short of this can comprise a rationally or morally coherent position for anyone who claims to care about public health.

(This started out as a comment and I don’t have time to work it up into a full post right now, but I’ll post it as a note.)

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Peer review is increasingly corrupt. Plenty of good studies have been suppressed or subjected to attempted suppressions by corrupt reviewers. Just this morning I was reading about the example of Ignacio Chapela and David Quist’s findings of GM contamination in Mexican criollo maize landraces and the fact that the corrupting effects of the transgene were expressing chaotically in both the genome and the physical manifestations of the phenotype. In addition to proving how easily and widely GMO contamination proceeds, this was the strongest evidence to date of the fact that genetic engineering is an extremely stupid, messy, chaotic process with highly unpredictable, chaotic results. Conversely it’s among the strongest refutations of the hack lie that GE is some kind of “precision”, “scientific” process. It’s really just very sloppy, brute force empiricism.

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Even though the Mexican government, which no one would ever mistake for being anti-GMO, had confirmed the first peer-reviewed, Nature-published study, under industry pressure Nature cravenly and despicably disavowed it. Then when Ezcurra and team submitted their study (mentioned in the above link) confirming and expanding upon Chapela and Quist’s findings, Nature intentionally sent it to known corrupt pro-GM “reviewers” who rejected it. The funny thing is the pro-GM activists didn’t get their rationale straight among themselves ahead of time, and so one of them rejected it because the result was simply “impossible”. Now THAT’s “scientific”. Of course Monsanto itself had long adhered to the line that what it dubs with the euphemism “adventitious presence” is inevitable, “natural”, and nothing to worry about. Thus a second reviewer rejected the study because the result was “obvious” and therefore pedestrian. How’s that for suppressing a clear fact – declare that it’s so clear that no one should be allowed to point it out any longer. We see the pro-GM activist version of “science” in action.

We still see the fetish of “peer review” cropping up often among GMO critics, but this is misguided. Peer review can’t be relied upon any more than any other institution of establishment “science”. In this radically corrupted environment we have to take any alleged piece of science on a case-by-case basis, judging according to its methodology and who paid for it. Just to give one example, by definition a legitimate toxicology or cancer study has to proceed for the duration of the full life cycle of the test subjects. Thus by definition only the Seralini study is even a candidate for incarnating legitimate science since it lasted for the full 2-year life cycle of the rat subjects, while Monsanto’s 90-day “subchronic” studies are by definition illegitimate. (90 days is a typical duration for fraudulent industry “studies”.)

1. The name “Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership” expresses what the globalization process sees as the only real sovereign group and political constituency – corporate “investors”. (Under the term “stakeholders”, these are explicitly considered to be the only legitimate citizens of the corporate-dominated society envisioned by the TTIP and similar pacts. These pacts comprise a new Corporate Constitution to effectively crush existing human constitutions and institutions.) Meanwhile the term “trade” is purely Orwellian, since globalization is not about legitimate demand-based trade, but the extreme opposite: Forcing supply upon markets which don’t demand it at all, or don’t demand it in the form corporatism wants to supply it.

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The system takes it for granted that the goal of the TTIP and of all globalization policy (and government policy as such) is “market liberalization”, i.e. a command economy based on overproduction, corporate welfare, dumping, coerced markets, and the total gutting of all public interest regulation. Note well that only public interest regulation and demand-side policy like local buying requirements are targeted for “equivalence” and “coordination”. Corporate welfare, such as Big Ag crop insurance, is not considered a “regulation” which needs to be “equalized” among the parties to the compact.

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We need rigorous discipline regarding the propaganda term “free trade”. We should never let this term pass unnoticed in our thoughts and words. We must reject in thought and words any concession to the Big Lie that globalization has anything to do with legitimate trade. Globalization is all about maximizing the imperatives and prerogatives of supply-driven corporate “markets”, toward the corporate concentration of all economic and political power. Real trade is demand-based and develops naturally and organically from human economies. Globalization, so-called “free trade”, is a top-down planned economy based on intentional overproduction and the subsequent forced creation of “markets” for this overproduction. To be anti-globalization is therefore to be pro-trade in the real economic sense, and vice versa.

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Europe proves that the supply-driven export dictatorship which globalization pacts seek to impose aren’t necessary for the general prosperity. For example, Europe’s overwhelmingly conventional agriculture is superior in every way, quantitatively and qualitatively, to the GMO-based agriculture dominant in the US and Canada. This proves at least that a fully modern Western society is better off without GMOs. But one of the core goals of the TTIP is to impose the US GMO model upon Europe, thus eradicating Europe’s great qualitative advantage, for the domestic economy and for trade.

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This leads us to the specific case of GMOs and their structural importance. Obviously the US government and the GMO cartel see Europe as a massive, relatively untapped market. But beyond this, they have a structural imperative to force all economies to come under GMO domination. They also loathe the current state of European agriculture as a real world alternative which has proven superior in every way to GMO domination. Europe proves every day that even given the parameters of industrial agriculture, GMOs are unnecessary and inferior. Europe proves every day that conventional agriculture performs better and less expensively without them. This is an ongoing embarrassment and affront to US corporatism. The US corporate system tries to deny this in the same way that during the Cold War the US and USSR would deny the very existence of ways in which one outperformed the other.

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They would have destroyed these embarrassing facts if they could. Today the US government is trying to use the TTIP to wipe out the embarrassing fact of Europe’s superior agriculture and its far healthier food system. The EC bureaucracy is coordinated with this goal, since by its nature it sees things in terms of corporate one-world government rather than as a power struggle with the US-corporatist bloc.

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2. The explicit goal of the TTIP is to coordinate all regulation which has anything to do with “any planned and existing trade”. That means all regulation, law, court decisions, etc. It’s the same principle as with the totalitarian expansion of the commerce clause in US constitutional jurisprudence, since it can encompass literally anything power wants it to. The coordination is also to be extended by whatever means necessary to EU member countries and US states. Sector-specific provisions will supersede “cross-cutting horizontal” coordination, which sets a floor. Corporate-dictated “commerce” assaults and supply-driven “trade” are already taken in the US to encompass all production/consumption activity including the informal economy, including production purely for personal use and including even pure inertness. That is, the imposition of corporate poll taxes is said by the system to be part of the Commerce power. The TTIP will enforce this for Europe as well, and far more intensely for both zones. Note well that as usual this only goes one way. Domestic economic activity, the informal economy, production for personal use, and any other kind of activity which doesn’t formally seek profit across national borders will not have access to the World Bank tribunals or to any court to litigate any harm arising out of this “trade” aggression. As always with this criminal system, it’s heads the elites win, tails the people lose.

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The process gives oligopoly corporations based in any country which is party to a compact special privileges over the rights of the people or of any legitimate business within any country which is also a party. It exalts the “right” to corporate profit and supply-driven “trade” as the supreme imperatives of society, lofting these far above all other values, rights, goals of policy and law. This includes the suppression of domestic economic activity, since the supply-driven export imperative favors the big corporations, the oligopoly sectors. NAFTA’s Chapter 11, upon which the TTIP and TPP ISDS provisions are modeled, lets corporations complain about any policy, law, regulation, court decision, which in any way allegedly infringes on any hypothetical profit the corporations can conceive. This has nothing to do with uneven treatment between foreign and domestic businesses. Even where the provision applies equally to all, it’s held to strict liability as far as how it impacts any corporation’s alleged ability to profit.

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This is proof that globalization compacts are not about trade, but about power. If they were about trade, then a law which applied to everyone equally wouldn’t be a problem.

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Profit, meanwhile, is purely a measure of power, indeed an artifice of the mysticism of power. Especially in the time of quantitative easing and mark-to-make believe accounting for the finance sector and “austerity” for humanity, corporate “profit” is self-evidently a reflection not of actual productivity and wealth but on the contrary of destruction and robbery.

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3. In being formally totalitarian, dedicated only to profit in principle, corporate bureaucracies are explicitly established as the direct exercise and rule of power (Might Makes Right), mediated only by government regulatory action. Strictly speaking, corporations are not supposed to be restrained directly by law. On the contrary, part of the purpose of the corporate form is to place legal barriers between the actions of corporate cadres and those actions’ having any actionable legal character, civil or criminal. The purpose is to legalize crimes when committed by representatives of “the corporation”.

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Government bureaucracy, meanwhile, is supposed to be restrained by law and by respect for democracy. But here too individuals are often formally absolved of personal responsibility for actions. This kind of absolution goes to the core of the evil of any such hierarchies, since nothing is so firmly proven as that if you give individuals power and freedom from consequences for their actions, they’ll take their actions to bad extremes. That’s why humans should never allow power to concentrate, and should never grant individuals a blank check, and most of all should never combine the two. Meanwhile it’s laughable to expect any bureaucrat to respect democracy. By its nature bureaucracy respects only administrative power and process, and despises law and democracy. (Meanwhile, the “Law and Economics” ideology and jurisprudence seeks to impose radical responsibility upon regular workers for their actions, even where coerced by bosses into dangerous or illegal actions. There’s the Heads I Win Tails You Lose again.)

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With this Gleichschaltung plan, a more complete formalization and rationalization of government bureaucracy’s subordination to corporate bureaucracy, the nominally “legal” bureaucracy is to be subsumed under the direct power bureaucracy. The government regulators are then to use their nominal fig leaf of legality, not as a restraint on power, but as propaganda on power’s behalf (and, where appropriate, as a weapon against rivals). This is the most institutionalized and rationalized form of the neoliberal scam.

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So EC bureaucrats and similar bureaucracies (e.g. the EPA, FDA, and USDA) exemplify the mindset and role of the bureaucrat, which is to carry out the dictates of power in an automated way. As corporate power increases, these government bureaucracies will naturally become more inherently pro-corporate. This is according to their basic inertia, what they inherently are, rather than “capture” or “corruption”. These latter do exist, but are epiphenomenal. To emphasize those is to reinforce the lie that corporations and regulators have any kind of inherently adversarial relationship. On the contrary, where corporations hold the power, bureaucrats naturally see them as their true constituency. All this is also naturally pleasing to the inherent elitism and anti-democratic tendencies of bureaucrat types.

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4. Where there’s any conflict between the corporate domination imperative and any other value, it’s taken for granted there can be no compromise. The non-corporate value must submit, if necessary to the point of its own extinction. As the historical record makes clear, this is true of all human values – health, happiness, prosperity, culture, tradition, religion, morality, simple human decency and fairness. None of these can coexist with corporations. In the long run these must all go extinct, if corporatism continues to exist.

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This is borne out by the analysis of globalization as an economic and anti-political offensive being carried out by corporatism toward the goal of total domination. By economic and anti-political I mean that the goal is total domination through total economic domination, while all real manifestations of politics are to be suppressed completely. The neoliberal phony semblance of “politics” – sham elections, nominal constitutional rights and so on – may continue for some time. Actual power will be exercised at the command of corporate oligopoly sectors, by executive government bureaucracies and extranational globalization tribunals, and increasingly, directly by the corporations themselves.

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5. This is not a new kind of corporate behavior. Privateering, the formal charter to commit crimes, goes back to the 16th century, the dawn of the corporate form. Corporations were envisioned in the first place to help enable “violent crime grafted onto trade”, as Ted Nace put it. The very term “free trade” originally referred directly to freedom from the law. Or as Hannah Arendt wrote in Origins of Totalitarianism, legalized gangsters sought to use politics to regulate their bloodshed. The British East India Company’s violent lawlessness is exactly mirrored today in the form every sort of corporate thuggery and the way corporate crimes are generally considered above and outside the law. Blackwater, explicitly declared above the law and granted a charter to literally perpetrate massacres, is merely the distillation of the way every large corporation is empowered to act, and the way they usually do act. Indeed, in principle this is the way they are required to act according to the core principle that profit-seeking is the only acceptable value. (What kind of sick society would ever have enshrined such a sociopathic form in the first place? The very existence of profit-seeking corporations reflects a self-loathing and self-destructiveness on the part of civilization itself.)

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Today’s “free trade” has exactly the same criminal nature, but the term has been sanitized to refer to an economic theory rather than a legal concept of chartered outlawry.

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Today it’s true in a precise sense that corporations are formally legalized criminal organizations. Take for example the repeal of the bucket laws, which used to recognize gambling as gambling whether done over dice in a back alley or stocks on an exchange. A bank couldn’t ask the state to enforce a wager any more than could a two-bit hood. But these sane laws started being repealed in the 1980s. The process culminated in the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (CFMA; recognize a similarity to the “Food Safety Modernization Act” (FSMA)? the similarity isn’t just terminological). Now what was naturally unproductive antisocial gambling was legalized as a “contract”. The result was massively bloated bank profits and hideous distortions of the economy, climaxing in Wall Street’s intentional crash of the real economy in 2008. The crash was then used as the pretext for the Bailout and austerity. The Wall Street bailout was a massive payout on bets gone bust. This entire process was premeditated and had its origin in the legalization of what are naturally outlawed acts. Acts of reckless gambling by the banks, indistinguishable from a bunch of drunks at a bar betting on a football game, have come to comprise legal contracts. Of course, when a solitary bum bets his children’s lunch money at the track and loses, it’s terrible for that family. When the government lets the banksters do the same thing with trillions and then pays off these bets with taxpayer money, millions of children must go hungry.

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The massive collusion, dating back to the 1990s, to fraudulently induce mortgages was helped along by this original legalization. And the rest of the crimes were piggybacked on these, leading up to the finance sector’s intentional crash of the global economy in 2008. Today where ISDS is in force we see the most extreme form of this kind of government protection. Here the corporate gambler doesn’t even need to make the bet, but only to say it could exist in theory, in order to get paid.

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This is the most extremely destructive and the most typical of the legalized forms of organized crime which are bound up in the corporate form. While many of the subsequent crimes may still technically be illegal, they were enabled by the underlying legalization of gambling. And once the government has been corrupted enough, even existing laws are no longer enforced, as we see every day. This is simply the de facto legalization of corporate crime.

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6. Corporatism is the process by which the 1% seeks to shift decision-making power and control from nominally “public” government to nominally “private” corporations. In US constitutional parlance, the system is transferring this power asset from the three branches of government enshrined in the written constitution to the extra-constitutional Fourth Branch, the corporations. In this way, power and control are shifted from nominally accountable “representative democracy” to power structures which are totally unaccountable even in principle. The nominal government remains as corporate welfare bagman and police thug, and to maintain the fraudulent facade of elections and other trappings of representative democracy. I call this the bagman-thug model of government. This process is also called neoliberalism, since it seeks to maintain the semblance of classical liberalism and pseudo-democracy even as it institutes most of the substance of fascism.

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This is part of the 1%’s general secession trend. The government abdicates its power to corporations at home, to globalization cadres abroad. It imports the alien power of the globalization cadres to domestic affairs. Throughout, government abdicates all public policy, privatizes all public property, but maximizes its absolute size, only now as corporate welfare bagman and thug.

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Accounting 101 for corporate rule: The entity is Government. Power is its asset. Democratic accountability and financial risk are among its liabilities. Government’s creation and support for corporations is an organizational shell game. The goal is to transfer the power asset to the “private” corporate entity while leaving all liabilities with the taxpayer-liable “public” entity.

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To sum up, here’s the basic tenets of corporate ideology:

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A. Governments should create corporations. (Corporations are in fact extensions of government. They’re meant to reorganize central government power, removing it from even the theoretical jurisdiction of “representative government”. It’s a kind of organizational shell game, transferring an asset from one entity to another. Meanwhile any liabilities remain with the original entity.)

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B. Corporations should be enshrined as entities that have infinite rights and zero responsibilities. They should have their profits guaranteed by the government, while all their risks are assumed by the government (i.e. the taxpayers, society) and the environment.

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C. The main purpose of government is to provide corporate welfare and thug services for corporations.

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D. Government should seek to liquidate all aspects of itself which are not directly toward B and C.

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E. Government (including in the form of globalization cadres like the WTO and IMF) should always get bigger and more aggressive, but only in ways that are directly toward B and C.

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F. The purpose of humanity and the earth are to serve as resource mines and waste dumps for corporations. Society, civilization, etc., are to be maintained only insofar as they help organize and pacify these slaves and victims. Otherwise these are to be liquidated.

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Of course I’m not saying there’s some secret master council while consciously deliberates all this. I’m describing the behavior and inertia of a socioeconomic and political force, in the same way I’d describe how the ocean organizes itself and moves.

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7. Today we confront the ultimate totalitarian manifestation of this ideology and the institutions based upon it, globalization. This reached a new level of aggressiveness in the post-war time, and especially since the end of the Cold War. The “free trade” treaties starting with NAFTA, “the law of the land” according to the Constitution, comprise a global anti-constitution. Their only content enshrines corporate license and prerogative at a level far above national governments and laws. Democracy and civil society have no place at all in this system. The “treaties”, written by multinational corporations, peddled by corrupted bagman/goon governments, and forced upon all other countries, are nothing but laundry lists of anti-sovereign usurpation and incitements to governments to set up administrative “free trade zones”, designed to obliterate all rule of law after the example of the Nazi General Government of Poland (as Richard Rubenstein pointed out, legalistically speaking no crimes were committed at Auschwitz), whose secession from law and civil society are then to be extended to encompass the entire “country”. At that point sovereignty would be completely obliterated and replaced by direct corporate rule.

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The provisions are set up to encourage corporations or their goon government proxies to file lawsuits against any manifestation of sovereignty or democracy anywhere which could hinder the profit-seeking imperative, which is the only one recognized by the globalization structure. (The same imperative which is the only one recognized by the “legal personality” regime.) The suits are heard by unelected, unaccountable secret tribunals staffed, as are the globalization cadres themselves, by corporate lawyers who come in through the revolving door. Suits have been filed against the US, Canada, Mexico, and many other governments. The very threat of such suits has a stifling effect on democracy and public health.

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While the WTO is relatively backward in having governments sue other governments on behalf of corporations, lateral agreements like NAFTA are more advanced in having the corporation directly sue the offending democracy. If it was deranged to allow domestic corporations to sue for rights against the government that created them, how anti-sovereign is it to allow alien corporations to sue a government? Perhaps the most telling fact is that under NAFTA and similar “treaties”, an alien corporation actually has more rights against a sovereign people than a purely domestic one not involved in global commerce and therefore not eligible for the powers of the Treaty.

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This perversion of sovereignty is the terminal manifestation of how so-called foreign policy has always been the mechanism by which anti-democracy and subversion has been innovated “elsewhere” and then brought home to impose domestic tyranny.

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8. The policies business wants encoded in the TTIP and TPP and enforced by governments and World Bank tribunals provide a clear picture of what these persons are. They’re nominally “businessmen” seeking “profit”. They’re really political and economic totalitarians seeking total power and control. They seek this under the rubric of business ideology, and using the corporation as their basic mode of organization. But any large corporation is not really trying to provide a good/service and make a profit, but is rather a power-seeking organization using its particular economic sector as its base of operations. It seeks to attain total power within that sector and use that economic base to assert political domination as extensively as possible.

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I was about to say, “just because it’s not overtly political, the way a de jure political party or political pressure group is, doesn’t make it any less the same kind of organization.” But in fact anyone who pays attention to corporate actions knows they’re every bit as openly political as any non-profit, de jure political group. Corporations and their trade groups describe and disseminate political principles, devise political strategies and carry them out, lobby nominal politicians and regulators. There’s really no such thing as a lobbyist-politician dichotomy, but only two political activists talking to one another. In every way corporations are organizations which seek political power. The only difference is that under representative democracy a de jure “party” is the kind of organization which runs someone called a “candidate” for a particular type of political office, while corporations are bureaucracies, identical in a de facto way to nominal government bureaucracies like the USDA or FDA.

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The twin bureaucratic structures, corporate and regulatory, understand their mission well. Today the TTIP and the TPP propose to expand the NAFTA model from North America across both oceans to encompass Europe and the Pacific Rim under a single corporate umbrella, turn the Atlantic and Pacific into ponds upon one big corporate park, use this power position to overawe Latin America and ruthlessly subjugate Africa, and to crush what’s left of the substance of democracy and economic self-determination in every country encompassed, including America and the EU. The corporations see total power within their grasp. Today they’re gearing up to reach for it. The coupled mechanisms of the globalization compacts through which they intend to attain the totalitarian goal are “investor-to-state dispute settlement” (ISDS) and “regulatory coherence”. The former is a direct assault on democracy, civil society, and politics as such, as well as being a massive corporate welfare conveyor. The latter is a formula for total bureaucratic Gleichschaltung (coordination). More specifically, it’s a plan to fully and formally institutionalize the subservience of government bureaucracy to corporate bureaucracy, and to fully rationalize the processes of this subservience.

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Take for example the European Commission. The existing EU system is not pleasing to it. The EC, like any bureaucracy, despises democracy and accountability, and politics as such, and seeks to maximize its own power as such without any necessary reference to what its nominal job is supposed to be.

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To its ongoing frustration, the EC hasn’t been able to persuade Europeans to relinquish political power, nor has economic coordination gone as far as the Commission wants, which is always the maximum conceivable. Although the EC has vast power to propose and decree “legislation” (what really are administrative decrees for the most part), it’s subject to some checks and balances from the European Council of national ministers and, to a lesser extent, the elected Parliament. Both of these latter bodies are subject to considerable bottom-up pressure from the people, and in turn put pressure on the EC. A good example of how the EC has been hamstrung is how relatively few GMO applications it has approved for cultivation, even though in theory it could have decreed the approval of far more. Of course a more practical obstacle is that few European countries want to cultivate them.

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So in the EU there’s mostly administrative rule in theory, but to its disgust the EC has to jump through lots of political hoops. It looks to the TTIP to solve this problem of residual democracy. That’s why the EC is so ardent to embrace a compact which will turn it into a flunkey of the US government and mostly US-based corporations. The EC would rather hold a lower position in a fully rationalized, coordinated hierarchy of administrative rule, than be at the top of what it sees as a mishmash.

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The TTIP is meant to override European democracy and European politics in general. Globalization is inherently anti-political. Corporatism sees politics as such to be an atavism. Globalization is meant to impose a bureaucratic, anti-political solution to this atavism.

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To sum up. Regulatory coordination as enshrined under the TTIP and TPP will seek to:

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*Formally coordinate all regulators under the goal of serving corporate power. It will formally subordinate government bureaucracy to corporate bureaucracy. Bureaucracy will go to war against democracy, politics and whatever’s left of law, while sham law will be enlisted to serve corporate power. All real government power (i.e. the power of violence) will be put under corporate control.

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*A race to the bottom among all governments in all regulatory sectors.

*Regulators shall always be proactive on behalf of the corporations and at their command.

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*Regulators shall always inform the corporations of any threat and help them to fight it.

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*Regulators are to be required to respond to any corporate demands.

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*All this is to be always in motion, always accelerating, always seeking the next way to further amplify corporate profit, power, control, domination.

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Real power is inertially in the hands of the bureaucracies, “public” and “private”. But of course bureaucracies don’t just passively receive and use the power which economic structures deliver to them. On the contrary, globalization is a planned economy. It’s been planned by those same bureaucrats toward the goal of permanently increasing and expanding their power. Going back to the rise of imperialist ideology and corporate lobbying in the 19th century, corporatism has relentlessly and with ever greater self-consciousness and intentional focus sought to build this command economy.

The proposal is clearly not just any proposal. On both sides, many other cross-sector business groups explicitly support the proposal or suggest a similar approach in their contributions to the official consultations on TTIP, including BDI (German Industry Association), Confederation of British Industry, Coalitions of Services Industries, British American Business, National Foreign Trade Council, Roundtable on Trade and Competition, Transatlantic Business Council, National Association of Manufacturers, Eurometaux and the United States Council for International Business. Some, notably the Competitive Enterprise Institute, take a step further and demand that businesses are able to choose freely which set of standards and regulations they will apply.

On top of this, 30 business associations, including most of the aforementioned, have written a common letter to the US Trade Representative and to Commissioner de Gucht’s department to stress the importance of a system of “regulatory cooperation”. They include sectoral lobby groups from the chemicals industry, car industry, the financial sector, biotechnology, pharmaceutical industry and many more. They point to the existing structures on regulatory dialogue, the High Level Regulatory Cooperation Forum, and assert that they “can be made much more effective and should include enhanced opportunities for dialogue with stakeholders”.

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This is explicit confirmation from the corporations themselves that their goal is total economic control and domination, to be leveraged into total political control and domination. This confirms everything I’ve written about corporate totalitarianism and that humanity’s great need is to completely abolish the de jure corporate mode of organization. We have to abolish the corporations completely.

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9. Today we’ve reached the terminal stage of this devolution. The neofeudal elites wish to undertake the final enclosure of all real assets – land, natural resources, physical space itself, buildings, infrastructure, and all the products of the mind. At the same time they want to cut all ties with human beings other than the ties of exploitation. They want to eradicate all semblance of government, law, and civil society, except insofar as these are weapons of domination or of pacification. They want to take totalitarian control of the Earth itself, enjoy a total license to do anything they wish and have this license enshrined as their “right”, while being absolved of literally ALL social or legal responsibility. These sociopaths, these willful outlaws, want to actually secede from civilization. They want to steal all the benefit of human interaction but incur zero reciprocal responsibility or obligation. They want to burn off all relationships between human and human, distilling them to the primal confrontation of master and slave in the dead of a wasteland. Since neither slaver nor slave can be human, these corporate fundamentalists wish to completely eradicate civilization and humanity itself. They are in fact post-civilizational barbarians.

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The TTIP (and TPP) as a whole is an assault on freedom, democracy, economic prosperity, and human happiness. It’s to be a major escalation of corporate tyranny, a major step toward corporate domination. As we should have abundant experience by now, all of its promises are lies, and none of its promised benefits will come true. It’ll only accelerate the corporate destruction of the real economy and what’s left of democratic politics, leaving behind only austerity, serfdom, hunger, disease, and an ever more severe police state.

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The rise of corporate rule has been a counterrevolution within the revolutionary age of fossil fuels, industrialism, capitalism, and democracy. Just as those, including the birth of the democratic consciousness, were features of the Oil Age, so was corporate rule a necessary countermeasure if the crypto-feudal parasites were to carry their prerogatives through the dangerous age.

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Now all of those except one must decline and perish. In prospect we perceive the feudal core now rising again in the form of post-capitalist corporate domination, and we experience whatever’s left of the democratic consciousness which is the one shining legacy of the fossil fuel age, the greatest lesson humanity has ever learned, the most marvelous gift we bestowed upon ourselves out of the seemingly endless and pointless travails of history. It’s now up to us to either embrace this democratic heritage and go forward boldly living it, or reject it and adhere to the noxious residue as eternal slaves in the darkness.

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Here’s my earlier TTIP posts. If you don’t read anything else, I strongly recommend reading at least part one about the coordination plan and the ISDS post.